Amazon Web Services offers AWS Config, a service that provides monitoring and assessment of AWS resource configurations to support compliance auditing, change management and troubleshooting, with resource histories and comparison of historical configurations against planned configurations.
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Consul
Score 9.6 out of 10
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HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.
$0
always free
Pricing
AWS Config
HashiCorp Consul
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Open Source (self-managed)
$0
always free
HCP Consul (Cloud)
$0.027/hr
Per Hour
Enterprise
Self-Managed Custom Deployments
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Config
Consul
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
With AWS Config, you are charged based on the number of configuration items recorded, the number of active AWS Config rule evaluations and the number of conformance pack evaluations in your account. A configuration item is a record of the configuration state of a resource in your AWS account. An AWS Config rule evaluation is a compliance state evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule in your AWS account, and a conformance pack evaluation is the evaluation of a resource by an AWS Config rule within the conformance pack.
To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.
Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.
Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.
Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).
Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.
The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services
I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.
Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.
We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services. Unfortunately that was a pain because of:
Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead
Consul brought the following benefits:
Its own modern web UI
Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.
It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.
